No Disc. No Buy: Why we Stand With Physical Media Collectors

On 1 July 2026, Sony confirmed something collectors had feared for years: physical disc production for new PlayStation games will end in January 2028. From that point on, every new release on PlayStation consoles, including whatever comes with PS6, will exist only as a digital download. Games that have already launched, or that launch before the cutoff, aren't affected. Everything after it will.

The reaction was immediate and it wasn't quiet. Within days, #NoDiscNoBuy was everywhere, with Metal Gear Solid's Solid Snake voice actor David Hayter posting his own game shelf in protest and tagging PlayStation directly. Trevor Noah weighed in. Even KFC and Domino's got their jabs in. People cancelled PlayStation Plus subscriptions in droves, though Sony seemed happy to buy some of them back with 50% off deals. It's the kind of backlash that doesn't happen unless a company has touched something people genuinely care about.

We do too. Frame-A-Game exists because we're collectors first and a business second. We built our frames and mounts because we wanted to see our physical media, our steelbooks, our discs on the wall rather than boxed up in a cupboard. A library you can hold and display is the whole point. Sony's decision chips away at that, and we're not going to pretend it doesn't matter just because it's convenient for a platform holder's balance sheet.

Sony's own numbers explain the timing. In its FY2025 Q4 results, the company reported that digital downloads already made up 85% of full-game software sales on PS4 and PS5, against 15% for physical. That's a genuinely lopsided split, and it's easy to see why a business would look at it and decide the smaller slice isn't worth the manufacturing and distribution overhead. But the reason that split favours digital so heavily isn't just consumer preference. It's economics stacked in the platform's favour from the start.

Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: physical retail typically hands roughly 30% of a game's sale price to the retailer's margin, on top of the costs of pressing discs, packaging, and shipping. Sony loses a real chunk of every boxed sale to the shops that stock it. Digital sales, particularly Sony's own first-party titles sold through its own store, don't carry that overhead. Sony keeps close to the full price. Cutting discs isn't really about what players want. It's about which version of a £70 sale Sony gets to keep entirely for itself.

That should worry more than just people who like a shelf full of cases. A digital-only market has no second-hand trade, and no second-hand trade means no price competition once the launch window closes. Full-price digital games tend to stay full price far longer than physical copies, which drop the moment a second-hand market forms around them. Push harder into digital-only and that pricing pressure disappears entirely, for buyers and for the games that don't manage to hit big. Studios that release something modest and hope to build an audience over time through resales, bargain bins, and word of mouth from someone who picked up a cheap copy lose that slow path to success. Without it, more of them will simply not survive a quiet launch.

And digital-only doesn't mean the industry pockets a windfall from cutting out costs. It means a bigger share of a smaller number of sales, with none of the resilience a physical market provides when things don't go to plan. That's a worse deal for developers long before it's a worse deal for us.

We understand why Sony likes these numbers. We don't think collectors should have to accept them quietly. Preservation, ownership, and the simple pleasure of a shelf that tells the story of what you've played, that's worth defending, and it's exactly what we build for.